


look on my works, ye mighty

by longtime_lurker



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longtime_lurker/pseuds/longtime_lurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(nothing beside remains.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	look on my works, ye mighty

**Author's Note:**

> based on a kinkmeme prompt: "Google+ becomes the new Facebook, while Facebook becomes the new MySpace. Mark kinda becomes a has-been. Enter still-bitter Eduardo..."
> 
> warning for alcohol abuse and general angst. epigraph from Sam Roberts, title and summary from Shelley. originally posted to LiveJournal in July 2011.

  
_ watch the sun set on the empire _   
_ one last round as it goes down _   
_ start a little fire in your best attire _   
_ you can blame the gin for the mess you're in _   
_ take a pension and retire... _   


  
 

“I take it you’re here to gloat just like everybody else,” is the first thing Mark says, when he sees him. “Here to tell me how richly I deserve it, how it was _karma.”_

He’s hunched into the corner of the VIP booth, empty except for him, too big for his compact little body. In front of him there's an open laptop and a double scotch, half finished, and even in the dim blue glow from his screen he looks like such shit that Eduardo can’t help but stare.

“I’m really not, Mark,” he says, and it’s the truth. Back when the first warning signs appeared – the new-adopter numbers gradually slowing to a trickle, the abandoned profiles like digital ghost towns as more and more people (young ones first, the coveted 18-24 demographic) first linked their Google+ pages from their Facebooks like “follow me here too!” and then tried to use both sites simultaneously for a while and then eventually decamped entirely, the buzz all over the tech blogosphere that fueled the usual media snowball effect as Facebook began to pick up that past-its-prime stench (countless number-crunching articles with their graphs and formulae, models predicting exactly how many people must decide that something's fallen out of fashion before that actually makes it happen) – back when all of it started, Eduardo had sort of expected to feel some sense of twisted satisfaction about it. Schadenfreude that the thing Mark had ended _them_ over was now, itself, coming to an end.

As it turned out, he didn’t. It was kind of like visiting your hometown and seeing somebody who’d been untouchable royalty back in high school now gone to seed, fried beyond repair by addiction or illness, stuck in a bad job, a bad marriage, going nowhere. Your past self might’ve thought you’d enjoy seeing that, how far they’ve fallen; in practice, it’s just depressing.

Which, speaking of depressing, brings him back to Mark’s fucking _face_ right now. Even in the mercifully low lighting of the club, Eduardo can see that the shadows under his eyes are nearly the color of the old baby-blue high school t-shirt he’s wearing, wrinkled like it’s been worn for days; his lips are cracked, parched despite the drink he’s downing. He doesn't look like a college kid anymore, suddenly, his face prematurely aged and drawn by suffering. And he stinks: like too many cold sweats and not enough showers, like days' worth of stale booze seeping out his pores. Billionaire or no, Eduardo’s frankly surprised that they let him into the VIP tonight. No, scratch that: he’s surprised they let him in at _all._

“Maybe ease up on the drinking, there,” he says, uselessly, since of course Mark pays no mind.

"So if you’re not here for that," and he's actually to the point of slurring his words, which for Mark means that he is very drunk indeed. “What _are_ you here for? Because if it’s to commiserate, I can tell you right now I have heard way the fuck more than enough of that already, and anyway I don’t - To be perfectly honest, I really don’t understand why you even would.”

Eduardo doesn’t answer right away. Instead he flags down a server. “Can we get a glass of water over here, when you have a minute?” He glances at Mark again and amends, “Better make it two, actually. Thanks.”

The server shoots him a look of such pure thank-fuck-you’re-here relief that Eduardo catches up to her a few steps away from the table, takes her aside to ask, “I hope he hasn’t been any trouble?”

She glances at him, evaluating. “Nothing we haven’t handled before. He got a little belligerent with one of the other girls, earlier.” She lowers her voice a little more. “To tell the truth he should’ve been cut off hours ago, but – my manager said he was still too big of a deal for that to be a good idea unless he started acting up for real, so.”

Eduardo sighs, screws one hand into his temple. “Sorry about that. I’ll get him out of here as soon as I can.”

“I appreciate it, sir.” She glances discreetly at Mark out of the corner of her eye and says, “If you don’t mind my asking – who _is_ he? I mean, besides apparently a big deal.”

“He invented Facebook,” Eduardo says.

The girl’s eyes widen, and Eduardo sees how young she is under her makeup. Or maybe he’s just getting old. “Wow, really?” she says. “I had one of those back in the day, in high school, before my friends all moved to G-plus. Good times.” She glances covertly at Mark again. “So what does he do now?”

“You’re seeing what he does now,” Eduardo says.

She looks at him, a sympathetic twist to her mouth, and says softly, “I’ll be right back with that water, sir,” and then she's heading off in the direction of the bar.

Eduardo goes back and sits down across from Mark. Mark is squinting doggedly into his laptop screen and typing, fast as ever but visibly clumsy-fingered: he keeps hitting the wrong keys and having to backspace. 

“Maybe you should put that away,” Eduardo says, “before you end up drunk-blogging again.” He knows better than to touch it, though, let alone try and actually pull it away. Mark always used to pitch a complete shitfit if you did that, drunk _or_ sober. And this time it's a moot point anyway because Mark is looking up, shutting the laptop lid somewhat harder than necessary, and repeating harshly, “You never answered my question, Wardo. Why are you _here_ if not to rub it in my face?”

“Okay, one: don’t call me that, you don’t get to do that anymore.” Eduardo’s head is starting to ache, and he’s not even the drunk one here, it’s just Mark’s usual effect on him. He wishes that girl would get back here with the water. “Two: if you seriously think I would seek you out just to _laugh_ at you, then you must not -” and he stops to rethink, rephrase, “that says more about you than –” stops again, “look, whatever, anyway, I’m here because a little bird told me you weren’t doing so hot. That’s all.”

“A little bird, huh. And you actually tracked me down and –” Mark stares blearily up at him, glaze-eyed and skeptical. “What the hell, Wardo,” and he laughs abrupt and sour as a belch. “What kind of glutton for punishment _are_ you.”

“I know.” He doesn’t even have the heart to call Mark out on the nickname use again, whether it was a drunken slip or deliberate baiting, no matter. “I don’t know.”

Right now it feels hard to hold onto his old anger properly, harder than he expected to remember the hell Mark’s younger self put him through, when the current version is slumped in front of him looking like he’s been through a few hells of his own lately. And he has, of course, in full and agonizing view of the avidly watching general public. Eduardo doesn’t even particularly try to follow stories about the politics of these things, not since he offloaded his own stake in Facebook, but he’s still managed to absorb the broad details by osmosis from the pervasive media coverage. He knows how, as Facebook continued to hemorrhage users, the shareholders frantically pushed through change after change to try and lure people back - but of course those tweaks were mostly ill-conceived rush jobs that only ended up alienating the people who _had_ still liked Facebook enough to stay. He knows about the further destruction wreaked by increasingly high employee turnover rates, as mass layoffs gutted the offices and executive after executive fled for greener pastures like rats deserting the proverbial sinking ship. He knows about the steady devaluation of Facebook's shares and Mark’s eventual, unthinkable ousting, forced to step down as President and CEO by the shareholders’ unanimous no-confidence vote amid a nightmare media blitz. He knows about the bidding wars over the pieces, finally, the once-biggest social network in the world sold off in parts like a junker car, and he knows about the eventual sale of the remains to some Chinese group for a paltry few million: orders of magnitude less than Facebook’s valuation at its zenith.

At first, after it all went down, Valleywag was always posting not-so-blind blind items – some anonymous asshole out there used to forward them to Eduardo’s email every time – that were all, _Which former social-networking king was spotted at Ruby Skye last night, alone and doing his apparent best to drink himself to death?_ But after a while those mostly stopped appearing, like even the bottom-feeders felt bad for him.

Their waters are here, and Eduardo nods his thanks to the server and gently pushes the icemelt remains of Mark’s scotch across the table, away from him, slides one of the new glasses in front of him instead. 

“I don’t want water,” Mark says, pushing back his chair abruptly, “and I don’t want to talk to you about this _shit,”_ and he’s standing, or trying to, but he’s way too fucked up to keep his balance and he staggers, arms jerking up for balance, hip banging against the table. Eduardo shoots up out of his own seat, catches Mark’s shoulder and steadies him, says, “See, no, that’s why you need the water.”

Mark sorts of sways into the touch. “Can we get out of here? I don’t – feel particularly well,” and it’s the clinging as much as the words that alarm Eduardo.

“Fuck.” He fumbles for his wallet and throws two fifties on the table, figuring that should cover both the drinks tab and the staff’s pain and suffering. He spent long enough dealing with Mark himself to know that it’s practically impossible to _over_ compensate someone for _that_ unenviable duty. “Yeah, c’mon, let’s get you home.”

“Other people pick up the check more frequently since I lost the equivalent of a small country’s GDP,” Mark remarks as Eduardo steers him across the dim club with a hand on his shoulder, skirting their way through the floor where the non-VIP masses drink and dance, towards the red glow of the EXIT sign. “You could say it’s one upside to the whole business.”

Eduardo tries to refrain from rolling his eyes, then realizes that it’s dark both indoors and out and lets himself do it after all. “Please, you’re hardly about to file for Chapter 11 here. You came out of the whole mess with – I saw the estimates, alright, you’re not exactly going to be sleeping in the gutter anytime soon.” And speaking of which – “Okay, we’re outside now, if you have to throw up you can.”

But the only thing coming out of Mark’s mouth is words, a torrent of them, as acid as actual vomit. “That’s not the _point._ You never did understand the point, Wardo, you thought it was all about the finances, when it was never anything as crass as _money._ It’s my _vision_ that –”

“Speaking as one billionaire to another: only obnoxiously rich people think that money is _crass,”_ Eduardo says. He pulls out his 5G smartphone, taps in a few words; it identifies the city he’s in, recommends him local car services in the order of their rating by people in his Google+ circles, and lets him request a vehicle at their current location. “And hey, while we’re at it, can I just remind you that I was right? All those years ago? You _did_ put ads on Facebook eventually.” 

It’s petty, and he immediately wishes he hadn't gone there. What's the point now, anyway.

“It was your timing that was wrong, not the content of your idea per se,” Mark replies automatically as Eduardo bundles him into the sleek, anonymous black Lincoln Town Car that’s just pulled up. It’s good to know that Mark can still drunk-argue with the best of them, he thinks. At the very least, it seems to snap him temporarily out of the catatonic stupor of despair. “And anyway, how’d that work out for Facebook?”

“Facebook didn’t collapse because of fucking _ads,”_ Eduardo snaps. “Excuse me,” and he leans forward and speaks softly to the driver.

“No,” concedes the huddled Mark-shape next to him – and _that’s_ new, Mark admitting that he was wrong about anything, ever. Though Eduardo supposes that Mark’s had to do a lot of that in the last couple of years. He can’t imagine it, literally can’t. Mark was always _so_ bad at dealing with failure, any kind, and this – this was _the_ Failure, the ultimate. Companies rise and fall every day, even giants: but Eduardo knows better than maybe anyone else that to Mark, this was never just a business venture. This is all of his dreams come to dust. 

In the darkness of the car he looks at his former friend, the two of them wrapped round by the white noise of the road and the driver’s ostentatious silence, outside the bright nightlife zipping by.

“I just - I can't understand, I don’t _get_ it,” Mark bursts out, shattering the quiet with his edgy-high drunken voice. “I gave it everything I _had,_ and then some -” and he glances at Eduardo for a split second, no eye contact, before his gaze flicks rapidly back to the neon strip out the window. “I worked so hard. To make sure, I. Wardo. How could it _happen?”_

Mark’s never been one for rhetorical questions, and so Eduardo says reluctantly, “You said it yourself: userbases are fickle.” With the way Mark’s body is sagging into the opposite seatcorner, it’s hard for him to be as brutally honest as he wants to be, as he should by all rights feel okay with being (with Mark of all people). He could say, _You built a chair, and then Google came along with its own chair that did everything your chair did only better;_ could, and maybe should, but he doesn’t. There’s honesty, and then there’s grinding salt into open wounds. 

For a long, long time Eduardo used to fantasize about taking Mark down a peg one way or another, and even now, that part of him still doesn't want to recognize that this Mark – shell of the old sharp-tongued fury stretched thin and brittle over a terrible grieving - doesn’t need that done to him anymore. 

He exhales a long breath, not quite a sigh. “I don’t know. A lot of what I read emphasized privacy backlash, people sick of that little blue button being everywhere you went online, the rise of the Anonymous movement - I think people just started to feel like Big Brother was watching them. You wanted Facebook to be _everywhere,_ Mark, literally every place you could go on the entire Internet, and you kept trying to add more and more features, make it bigger and bigger, and – maybe you overreached yourself. I don’t know. You'd hardly be the first.”

They’re pulled up at an intersection, and the red glow of the stoplights is bleeding in through the car window enough for Eduardo to see Mark’s profile, his closed eyes and the way his throat moves when he swallows, rests his elbow on the window lip and his forehead on his hand. “Tragic hubris, you’re saying.”

Mark loved his classics, Eduardo remembers.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” he says for the millionth time. “It’s not like I was there to see it from the inside.” That last comes out more bitter than he means it to, and he presses his mouth shut.

“Their precious _privacy,”_ Mark muses, and the light is still enough that Eduardo can see the wry twist on his lips. “It’s like fucking Facemash all over again.” 

Eduardo lets his own head fall back against the upholstery of the seat.

“You always did make people so _mad_ at you,” he says, reflectively. “And then you’d be _surprised,_ like you hadn’t seen it coming at all, like you couldn’t understand why.”

They’re pulling up to the curb, now and he’s shoving another fifty at the driver (just an all-out classfest, tonight) and the two of them tumble out, up Mark’s driveway towards his front porch. Mark’s totally out of it, still rambling under his breath, sullen and dazed; his feet waver, his body drooping into Eduardo’s side as Eduardo steers him up the steps. That last drink just now kicking in, maybe, or just exhaustion. It’s like two in the morning right now and who the fuck knows when Mark last slept. If he’s still anything like Eduardo remembers him, that could have been six hours ago or it could have been sixty. He bites down on the urge to ask, to check up. “C'mon, alright, almost there."

Mark turns his face up, looking at him, the sodium haze of the porch light throwing his haggard features into too-sharp relief. “Wardo, I was.” His iron-gray eyes are wide, as if with surprise, but numb: the thousand-yard stare of a trauma patient. “It was so. I didn’t – know anything could feel like that.” And then he’s stumbling across the porch and retching off the side. 

_Well now you do,_ Eduardo thinks but doesn’t say. He knows from things that hurt, and he knows from taking those things personally, but he just doesn't have the heart to bring any of that up again right now. There's such a thing as an appropriate time and place, and this isn't it. Instead he touches Mark’s shoulder gingerly and says, averting his eyes, “You done? For now? Okay. Got your keys?” 

“It was like watching your kid dying right in front of you,” Mark goes slurrily on, “and not being able to do anything about it.”

“Wow, I’m pretty sure it’s not actually like that at all,” Eduardo says mildly. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re a huge asshole for even making that comparison. _Keys,_ Mark.”

“They’re – somewhere in here,” Mark says, fumbling in his jeans pocket. “Can’t find ’em.”

Eduardo abandons all ceremony and steps in too close on the dim porch, paws into Mark’s pockets himself, back first and then front, businesslike and unlingering. He can feel the warmth of Mark’s body through the denim, remembers how that always used to surprise him, somehow, that Mark’s skin wasn’t metal-cool to the touch like some kind of machine. Mark’s barely even resisting him, Mark the touch-avoidant, and that more than anything tells Eduardo what a bad way he’s in. He curls his fingers in and down, digging until he hits the damn things and pulls them out, jingling. 

He gets the door open, waits for Mark to disarm the security system (drunk, Mark can’t locate an item in his physical _pants_ but can apparently still wrangle a keypad), and then crowds him inside, following the same keep-the-drunk-moving strategy he’s been employing all night. The lights come on automatically, making Mark wince beside him. It’s the first time all night that Eduardo's seen him in full light, after the shadows of club and car, street and porch, and it's doing him no favors.

Evidently Mark's housekeeper has just been through, since the place looks nearly as clean and anonymous as a hotel room. That makes things easier, somehow, makes it so Eduardo can almost pretend it’s neutral ground.

The impression is destroyed, though, as soon as he drags Mark in through the rec room and there’s a huge, ragged-edged chunk of plywall propped randomly in one corner. Its entire visible surface is crossed and crammed with doodles and scribbles, Magic-Marker graffiti of names and notes and smileys, and Eduardo squints at it, blurts out: “Is that from the old offices?”

“Yes,” says Mark, monotone, as they round the doorway into the master bedroom suite. “When they dismantled it I took a piece home,” and against his will Eduardo remembers, back before it all went bad, how much Mark loved that stupid [Wall](http://pics.livejournal.com/longtime_lurker/pic/00031h59).

He wants to touch Mark properly, with intent to comfort, lay a hand on his arm, his shoulder, the back of his neck; but instead he makes himself keep manhandling Mark’s stumbling ass towards the en-suite bath. Mark needs to sleep but first he needs to shower, as sweaty and boozy and pukey as he is. Eduardo starts the water up and throws a towel in Mark’s general direction, looking away when Mark starts peeling off the ratty blue t-shirt, hurrying out of the bathroom entirely when Mark steps into the shower and makes this grateful little involuntary groan as the warm spray hits his skin.

Mark stays in the shower for a really long time. Eduardo occupies himself examining another of the _objets d’art_ that lend a touch of personality to Mark’s otherwise spartan living space: the enormous framed world [map](http://pics.livejournal.com/longtime_lurker/pic/00030r1a) hung at the head of the bed. No matter Eduardo’s feelings on Facebook itself, then or now, this is a thing of beauty: a data visualization of the connections between every member of the site - from not long before their userbase hit its all-time apex, he’d guess – done in vivid blues, the whole world one great field of pale leylines. Eduardo finds his eyes tracing the delicate arcs, trying to pick out the ones that sweep between Sao Paolo and Miami, Miami and Cambridge. Cambridge and Palo Alto. Palo Alto and Singapore.

“You better not be trying to drown yourself in there,” he calls, eventually, cracking the bathroom door enough to poke his head in.

From behind the shower curtain he can hear Mark’s snort, _oh-please_ sardonic, like Eduardo’s little bird hadn’t told him that for weeks after the board forced him out, Mark had been on the next best thing to suicide watch.

“I like this geonetwork thing,” Eduardo tells him. “On your wall.” 

“Yes,” comes back Mark’s voice through the shower curtain, flat and affectless. "I was pretty attached to it myself."

Eduardo glances back at the projection, lit up like a star chart or a city viewed aerially at night. “Remember back at school” – the words taste strange in his mouth, nothing he’d ever thought he’d be saying to Mark again – “how whenever you smoked up, you'd start going on and on forever about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?”

Another snort. “Yes, I do see where you’re going with this, and no, it’s not remotely a meaningful parallel to draw. Mine didn’t last for centuries, it didn't outlive me, it barely even made it a decade." He sounds slightly more coherently sober, now, but no happier. "I wanted it to be like fashion, do you remember? Where the details are always changing, but the idea is forever. But instead it'll go down in history as just _a_ fashion.” 

Eduardo pushes the bathroom door the rest of the way open, steps inside. He puts a glass he took from Mark’s nightstand under the sink faucet and starts running the cold tap, filling it up, while he opens up Mark’s medicine cabinet and roots around for painkillers that aren’t way past expired and/or just empty bottles that Mark (of course) put right back on the shelf. “You realize you’ve still already achieved more by this age than ninety-nine point nineninenineninenine percent of people ever will in their lifetimes.” 

“Yeah, and lost more,” Mark says. The sound of his breathing echoes off the tiles, wet and heavy. “I’m _twenty-nine years old,_ Wardo. What do you do after peaking this early? What's even left for the rest?”

“Well,” says Eduardo, and lets it trail off, leaning in closer towards the thin veil of curtain that divides them. “Personally, I find that one can do worse than running halfway across the world and disappearing.”

He comes face to wet face with Mark as the shower turns off and the curtain’s pulled back. Their eyes lock for a second, then Mark says, “Can you hand me that –” and Eduardo says, “Yeah, here –” Mark steps unsteadily out of the shower and into the big plaid flannel bathrobe, and Eduardo catches a brief glimpse of pale flank as Mark tosses his head, making water droplets fly from his wet curls. He turns away. 

Back in the bedroom he goes to close the blinds, throwing the room into soothing grayscale. When he turns around he finds Mark already curled up at the foot of the bed, on top of the covers like an exhausted child. 

Eduardo sits down on the edge of the bed, too. “Drink,” he says, thrusting the pills and the glass of water at Mark, and for once Mark obeys. He looks a little better, clean skin pink with warmth where it’s slipping out of the robe at neck, wrist and ankle, but his face is still the awful blank of a dead thing's.

“I made so many sacrifices for it,” he’s muttering, eyes slipping shut. “I gave _you_ up,” and Eduardo’s heart hiccups painfully in his chest. “And what good was any of that in the end?”

Eduardo lets his breath out through his teeth. “Yeah, and if things had worked out in the long run, you never would’ve looked back long enough to give a damn about what you did to me. You would’ve just carried on like it was worth it, like the end justified the means. _Wouldn’t you?”_

“I don’t know,” Mark says, purely and pitilessly honest as always. “I don’t deal in hypotheticals.”

Eduardo makes a soft, scornful noise. “Sleep it off, Mark,” he says, and moves to stand. “I have to go.”

“Wardo. Stay,” Mark murmurs, and it's almost soft enough to be a request instead of a command.

Almost but not quite, and Eduardo’s temper flares.

“I said don’t _call_ me that,” he hisses. “I’m not your fucking lapdog” (thinks: _anymore)_ “and I really don’t know where you get off thinking you can _still_ just _order_ me to –”

“Please,” Mark says thickly, and he rears up and kisses Eduardo, hard and desperate. 

He’s just brushed his teeth and his mouth is sweet, he tastes good, and Eduardo lets it happen for a moment longer than he should before he pushes Mark away, gentle as he can. The flash of anger's ebbed away already, quickly as it came, leaving behind something more akin to pity.

 _“Mark,”_ he says, shaking his head, hands on Mark’s skinny shoulders pressing him back down to the bed, gentle, gentle. “Whoa, no, no, not like this. Mark, what are you – you don’t know what you’re doing, right now.”

Mark is shuddering, all over, and against his better judgment Eduardo reaches out and puts his arms around him.

“Time, you asshole,” he breathes, letting himself sink down as well, next to him, Mark’s shaky exhales puffing out against his own mouth. “You have to give these things _time.”_

“I’m told it heals all wounds,” Mark says, and gives him a ghastly parody of a smile. 

“Yeah, not really,” Eduardo says, “no.” And he goes and totally undermines his prior rebuff by pressing one more kiss, soft and chaste, to the damp swell of Mark’s bottom lip. “But eventually, it’ll - take off the rough edges at least, a bit, I guess. If you let it. The thing is you have to let it.”

Mark is hot and tearless under his hands, and he doesn’t say a word but his fingers grasp clumsily at Eduardo’s back, his side, catching and tightening. Eduardo pulls him closer, curving their bodies together, Mark’s head cradled upon Eduardo’s chest like it’s too heavy for him to hold up on his own anymore. 

Silently they gaze up at the blue web of the Facebook map on the wall.

“For what it's worth, I am sorry,” Eduardo whispers, finally. “The – all the rest of it aside. I’m sorry." 

"Yeah." And Mark repeats it back to him, all one hitching rush of breath. "Me too."

He doesn't specify what for, and Eduardo doesn't ask; only stays and holds on and keeps Mark right here beside him, nothing left to do but lie there in one another’s arms and breathe, together, just breathe.


End file.
